Act Now to Protect Scientific Integrity

One of these days, I will stop nagging Salisbury’s Take readers about submitting comments to the federal government to support good science. Today is not that day.

I’ve avoided writing much about a new proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget for a couple of reasons. First, it’s awfully weedy, and tough to explain accurately and succinctly to an audience of non-scientists. Second, it’s just one of an onslaught of proposals designed to chip away at scientific integrity and independence. There’s a very real risk of reader fatigue if I were to attempt to cover them all.

But the OMB proposal has the scientific community up in arms, so it is worth the attention. It’s also time-sensitive, as we have just three days left to submit comments that will be considered along with the proposal. So, it’s now or never.

If the new proposal were to become official policy, the upshot would be a lot more political interference in the country’s scientific enterprise. Believe it or not, federally funded science has largely been insulated from the meddling of politicians. Sure, the director of the National Institutes of Health is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but most nominees have been chosen for their scientific commitment rather than for their political leanings.

This matters because political offices change a lot faster than science happens. The process required to launch a new drug, say, might begin with a decade of academic research, followed by many years of translational research, and then at least a few years to optimize a drug candidate, plus several more years to run the clinical trials required for FDA review. If our scientific priorities whipsawed as often as partisan control of the House of Representatives, we’d never get a new drug approved. The same goes for any other scientific achievement that’s years in the making.

That’s why the process of choosing which scientific projects to advance is largely left to the scientists themselves. The agencies involved — in addition to NIH, there’s the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and several others — set their long-term strategic priorities, which can be influenced by political goals. But then grant opportunities are established, and one of the most important elements in that process is peer review, when several non-NIH scientists score the applications.

Funding is awarded to the proposals that garner the top scores. Grants are often issued for multi-year projects, with those funds paid out as promised over time regardless of who’s in the White House. That policy was shredded last year, when the Trump administration attempted to cancel countless grants. Judges have ordered many of those grants reinstated, but for some projects the damage was already done.

The OMB proposal aims to provide legal support for the administration’s goal of axing research projects they don’t agree with, and to allow politicians to have far more say in which projects are funded in the first place. It would make it easier for political appointees to suspend or cancel grants that have already been issued, restrict scientists’ ability to collaborate with researchers in other countries, and effectively eliminate the peer-review system as the deciding factor in which applications are funded.

But don’t take my word for it. The American Society of Human Genetics, which represents thousands of scientists, has already submitted a lengthy comment opposing the OMB proposal. It includes this gem: “If enacted, this rule would override federal agencies’ decision-making authority while weakening their scientific independence, a key feature of the United States’ research and development ecosystem that has enabled our global leadership for over seven decades. It would also undermine the scientific, merit-based peer-review system and cause a brain-drain of the best and brightest scientists to other countries.”

If you’re looking for more specific details about the proposal, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has you covered with an executive summary of the 400-page draft regulation.

Most importantly, though, we have three days left to make our voices heard. Regardless of your own personal political views, keeping science independent from politicians is important for ensuring integrity in research. It also maximizes the value of our collective investment in science by allowing projects to be completed, rather than canceled midway through.

You can submit a comment about the OMB rule by July 13, and you can reach out to your elected representatives to share your views. If this is important to you, please act quickly.